Conversational bots “live” online and give customers a familiar experience, similar to engaging an employee or a live agent, and they can offer that experience in higher volumes. Conversational bots offer scaling—or the capability to perform equally well under an expanding workload—in ways that human can’t, assisting businesses to reach customers in a way they couldn’t before. For one, businesses have created 24/7/365 online presence through conversational bots.
According to this study by Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, “the real buzz about this technology did not start before the spring of 2016. Two reasons for the sudden and renewed interest in chatbots were [number one] massive advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and a major usage shift from online social networksto mobile messaging applications such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack, Kik, and Viber.”
Its a chat-bot — For simplicity reasons in this article, it is assumed that the user will type in text and the bot would respond back with an appropriate message in the form of text (So, we will not be concerned with the aspects like ASR, speech recognition, speech to text, text to speech etc., Below architecture can anyways be enhanced with these components, as required).

Endurance is a companion chatbot that uses neurolinguistics programming (better known as NLP) to have friendly conversations with suspected patients with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. It uses AI technology to maintain a lucid conversation while simultaneously testing the human user’s ability to remember information in different ways. The chatbot encourages the user to talk about their favorite activities, memories, music, etc. This doesn’t just test the person’s memory but actively promotes their ability to recall.

For designing a chatbot conversation, you can refer this blog — “How to design a conversation for chatbots.” Chatbot interactions are segmented into structured and unstructured interactions. As the name suggests, the structured type is more about the logical flow of information, including menus, choices, and forms into account. The unstructured conversation flow includes freestyle plain text. Conversations with family, colleagues, friends and other acquaintances fall into this segment. Developing scripts for these messages will follow suit. While developing the script for messages, it is important to keep the conversation topics close to the purpose served by the chatbot. For the designer, interpreting user answers is important to develop scripts for a conversational user interface. The designer also turns their attention to close-ended conversations that are easy to handle and open-ended conversations that allow customers to communicate naturally.

With competitor Venmo already established, peer-to-peer payments is not in and of itself a compelling feature for Snapchat. However, adding wallet functionality and payment methods to the app does lay the groundwork for Snapchat to delve directly into commerce. The messaging app’s commerce strategy became more clear in April 2016 with its launch of shoppable stories with select partners in its Discover section. For the first time, while viewing video stories from Target and Lancome, users were able to “swipe up” to visit an e-commerce page embedded within the Snapchat app where they could purchase products from those partners.

As people research, they want the information they need as quickly as possible and are increasingly turning to voice search as the technology advances. Email inboxes have become more and more cluttered, so buyers have moved to social media to follow the brands they really care about. Ultimately, they now have the control — the ability to opt out, block, and unfollow any brand that betrays their trust.
As digital continues to rewrite the rules of engagement across industries and markets, a new competitive reality is emerging: “Being digital” soon won’t be enough. Organizations will use artificial intelligence and other technologies to help them make faster, more informed decisions, become far more efficient, and craft more personalized and relevant experiences for both customers and employees.
As VP of Coveo’s Platform line of business, Gauthier Robe oversees the company’s Intelligent Search Platform and roadmap, including Coveo Cloud, announced in June 2015. Gauthier is passionate about using technology to improve customers’ and people’s lives. He has over a decade of international experience in the high-tech industry and deep knowledge of Cloud Computing, electronics, IoT, and product management. Prior to Coveo, Gauthier worked for Amazon Web Services and held various positions in high-tech consulting firms, helping customers envision the future and achieve its potential. Gauthier resides in the Boston area and has an engineering degree from UCL & MIT. In his spare time, Gauthier enjoys tinkering with new technologies and connected devices.
Generally, companies engage in passive customer interactions. That is, they only respond to inquiries but don’t start chats. AI bots can begin the conversation and inform customers about sales and promotions. Moreover, virtual assistants can offer product pages, images, blog entries, and video tutorials. Suppose a customer finds a nice pair of jeans on your website. In this case, a chatbot can send them a link to a page with T-shirts that go well with them.
To inspire your first (or next) foray into the weird and wonderful world of chatbots, we've compiled a list of seven brands whose bot-based campaigns were fueled by an astute knowledge of their target audiences and solid copywriting. Check them out below, and start considering if a chatbot is the right move for your own company's next big marketing campaign.
Want to initiate the conversation with customers from your Facebook page rather than wait for them to come to you? Facebook lets you do that. You can load email addresses and phone numbers from your subscriber list into custom Facebook audiences. To discourage spam, Facebook charges a fee to use this service. You can then send a message directly from your page to the audience you created.
With our intuitive interface, you dont need any programming skills to create realistic and entertaining chatbots. Your chatbots live on the site and can chat independently with others. Transcripts of every chatbot's conversations are kept so you can read what your bot has said, and see their emotional relationships and memories. Best of all, it's free!

This reference architecture describes how to build an enterprise-grade conversational bot (chatbot) using the Azure Bot Framework. Each bot is different, but there are some common patterns, workflows, and technologies to be aware of. Especially for a bot to serve enterprise workloads, there are many design considerations beyond just the core functionality. This article covers the most essential design aspects, and introduces the tools needed to build a robust, secure, and actively learning bot.

How far are we from building systems with commonsense? One often-heard answer is: not in the near future, while the realistic answer is: we don’t know. Last year, I spent some time trying to build a system that can do better than an information retrieval baseline in taking fourth-grade science exam (which still has a ways to go to gain a passing score of 65%). I failed hard. Here’s an example to get a sense of the difficulty of these questions.
H&M’s consistent increased sales over the past year and its August announcement to launch an eCommerce presence in Canada and South Korea during the fall of 2016, along with 11 new H&M online markets (for a total of 35 markets by the end of the year), appear to signify positive results for its chatbot implementation (though direct correlations are unavailable on its website).
Screenless conversations are expected to dominate even more as internet connectivity and social media is poised to expand. From the era of Eliza to Alice to today’s conversational bots, we have come a long way. Conversational bots are changing the way businesses and programs interact with us. They have simplified many aspects of device use and the daily grind, and made interactions between customers and businesses more efficient.

However, chatbots are not just limited to answering queries and providing basic knowledge. They can work as an aid to the teacher/instructor by identifying spelling and grammatical mistakes with precision, checking homework, assigning projects, and, more importantly, keeping track of students' progress and achievements. A human can only do so much, whereas a bot has virtually an infinite capacity to store and analyse all data.

One pertinent field of AI research is natural language processing. Usually, weak AI fields employ specialized software or programming languages created specifically for the narrow function required. For example, A.L.I.C.E. uses a markup language called AIML, which is specific to its function as a conversational agent, and has since been adopted by various other developers of, so called, Alicebots. Nevertheless, A.L.I.C.E. is still purely based on pattern matching techniques without any reasoning capabilities, the same technique ELIZA was using back in 1966. This is not strong AI, which would require sapience and logical reasoning abilities.